Blood of Angels (15 page)

“Look, it's nothing. Just make sure you turn it on tonight, OK?”

“Is something wrong? What's this about?”

“Nothing's wrong. It's…look, it's no big deal. I'd just feel better if you had it on.”

“We have it on every night.”

“Wonderful. That's fine.”

I know what she's thinking; even after three years of divorce, she's still the person I know most intimately on Earth. She's thinking about my job, and how glad she is her life and Jazz's don't have to be touched anymore by wackos and killers and all the rest. Five years married to an assistant DA have taught her the code words, the rules of understatement. And she's a little scared for me, because she still cares about me more than she admits. Maybe it's only emotional inertia, or maybe it's because I'm Jazz's father, but she definitely cares. She knows that something is bothering me, and that nothing bothers me unless it's significant.

I know these things because even though Sarandokos is standing right beside her, she says, “Be careful, Thomas.”

AS A SENIOR PROSECUTOR
with Carl, I have enjoyed one surpassing privilege: I can handpick my cases, and I never work on more than one thing at a time. Carl and I have prosecuted more than thirty capital crimes together, taking the most complex, highest-profile cases that run through the district. Which means that if things were normal, I would spend the next day entirely focused on Moses Bol's case. But things are not normal. Professor Philip Buchanan waits to take us to a Browning BPS pump shotgun and Kwame Jamal Hale's version of the truth.

Coffee, Zoloft, the morning run—two shirtless miles on the hills around my house before the heat forces me back home—and a shower. In other words, I stay in my groove. Today is one of the biggest days of my professional life, but not because of Moses Bol. It's my past, exhumed by Professor Philip Buchanan to speak.

Carl, Rayburn, and I meet in the DA's office at 9:30, a half hour before Buchanan is due. Rayburn stands by his window, a place he's increasingly grown rooted to over the last few days. He's wearing one of his dark-blue suits, standard-issue politician garb. It's not hard to imagine him the state attorney general someday, or even governor. If the next few hours go the wrong way, it also isn't inconceivable that he would want to step through the window before him and into the void below.

Carl, on the other hand, is taking his next-to-last day as a prosecutor with classic stoicism. He just stands there, hands stuffed in his pockets, shirt slightly rumpled, suit needing a good pressing, his expression serious. “I just want this thing to be handled properly,” he says. “Quiet, with a little dignity. What we find out, we find out.”

“Lemme ask you guys something,” Rayburn says. “What makes these guys hate us so much?”

“You mean Buchanan?” I ask.

“Him, and all the other bleeding-heart liberals. I mean, there's a million crimes in this country every year. We bust our asses trying to keep our cities safe enough to live in, and it's a hell of a job.”

“Agreed,” Carl says.

“And these guys come along and interfere every step of the way. If they're not screaming about police brutality, they're trying to get killers back on the street. They invest a thousand hours of legal research to prove a guy who's already been convicted of several other crimes is innocent of one.” He closes his eyes, exhaling deeply. “Once in a blue fucking moon,” he says quietly, “I'd like to have one of them just thank us for a job well done.”

We sit silently awhile, the only sound the soft ticking of the clock on Rayburn's oak, three-drawer filing cabinet.

“David,” I say, “this guy Buchanan isn't worthy to tie your shoes.”

He opens his eyes and grins. “Damn right.”

Dolores has been told to hold calls into the office except for Buchanan, so we sit in silence, insulated from the city below us. We make small talk for a while, until the phone rings. It's 9:50, ten minutes before Buchanan's due. Rayburn picks up the phone, listens a second, and hangs up. “Something's going on,” he says. “There's a crowd gathering in front of the building.” The DA's window is on the back side of the building, so we move in formation along the perimeter hallway to the side that looks down on the street. Rayburn opens a door, apologizes to the surprised staffer, and we clump around her window. There, nine stories below, two media trucks are jockeying for parking spots. About fifty people are standing around, as well. Several are holding placards, and though they're too far away to read, it doesn't take much imagination to fill in the blanks; Buchanan is bringing the full protest circus to the big day. Second Avenue is also a major tourist area, and we can already see a few people jaywalking across the street to check things out. Cameramen spill out of the media trucks and begin filming the protesters.

“Get the doors, David,” Carl says, quietly.

Rayburn nods and picks up the telephone on the staffer's desk. “Have the guard secure the front door, will you, Dolores?” he says. “That's correct. Nobody in or out.” We move back out into the hall, and heads snap up from desks as we pass; a few staff members drift out of offices to see what's going on. The pissed-off expression on Rayburn's face shuts down any questions. We get back to the DA's office, and Rayburn slams shut the door. “It's a Geraldo,” he says. “The bastard leaked.”

“That's disappointing,” Carl says quietly. “One hopes for a little more honor.”

“Can we possibly conduct this operation with a bunch of reporters tagging along?” Rayburn demands.

“Wrong question,” I say. “Can we
refuse
to conduct it with reporters tagging along?”

Rayburn stares a second, as our situation sinks in. “No. We can't.”

Dolores pokes her head in the door. “I've called the guards, but Buchanan's already in the reception area. There's five people with him, and the guard downstairs says both elevators are full.”

“Holy shit. Excuse my French, Dolores.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Put one of the uniforms on the outer door. Call down and tell the guard that nobody gets on an elevator who doesn't work in the building. And try to get somebody outside, on the street. We don't want any rubber-necking goofballs getting hit by a car.” He turns to us. “So what do we think, gentlemen? Any suggestions?”

Carl shrugs. I swear to God, the man is implacable. “The worse one's adversary behaves, the more important it is to behave impeccably oneself.”

“What does that mean, dammit?”

“I think Carl's suggesting we turn up the dignity a notch,” I say.

Rayburn stares, then nods. “Damn, that's not bad.”

“Buchanan's got the usual hippie protest crowd,” Carl says. “They more they rant and wave their signs, the calmer we become. People will know whom to believe.”

Rayburn stands up straight and smooths his suit. He straightens his tie. “How do I look?”

“Like the district attorney,” Carl says. “Which is who you are.”

Rayburn smiles. “All right then. Let's go outdignify the fucker.”

 

WHEN RAYBURN PUNCHES
the code on the Simplex locks that open the door to the ninth-floor reception area, we're bathed in the cold, hard light of three video cameras. With one step out of the inner offices, we leave the real world and enter the weird zone, where appearance is everything. There, standing front and center, is Barry Dougherty, a reporter for the local CBS affiliate. Rayburn gets six inches into the room when Dougherty's accent-free, television voice rises above the din. “Mr. District Attorney! Was the wrong man executed in the Sunshine Grocery murders?”

Fresh from Carl's pep talk, Rayburn doesn't show a crease. “Hello, Barry. I appreciate the question. We have total confidence in the jury verdict that was handed down in that case. But in the interest of justice, we're here to follow up on Professor Buchanan's concerns.”

Dougherty looks momentarily disappointed; today's film will not include the sight of a district attorney melting down. Not disappointed enough, however. He leans forward, grinning fiercely. “You mention the jury, Mr. District Attorney. Are you aware that two members of that jury have already stated they would not have voted to convict if they had known about Kwame Jamal Hale?”

I close my eyes.
Buchanan has been lining up the jury. This thing is choreographed, start to finish.

Rayburn blanches slightly. “That's what makes this country great, Barry,” he says. “People are free to speak their minds.” He pushes past Dougherty to Buchanan. “So, Professor Buchanan. I thought we had a deal.”

Buchanan stands, smiling and relaxed. With him are two young women, college age, probably assistants. “People find things out,” he says. “News travels on its own.”

“Maybe it would be better if we just got on with this,” Rayburn says.

“You have your crew ready?”

“In our lot, ready to roll.”

The crowd moves into the hall, where a small but vocal crowd of protesters wait. They cheer Buchanan and his aides like rock stars. A second group, also early enough to make it upstairs before the cops sealed off the building, pile out of an arriving elevator, leaving Rayburn, Carl, and me surrounded by a group of twenty-somethings in blue jeans and tie-dyed T-shirts ranting in our faces against capital punishment. “No to state-sponsored killing! End the death machine!”

We're encircled by protesters, enduring a relentless barrage of camera flashes until an empty elevator arrives. The door opens, and the merry band piles in with us, chanting all the way down to street level. One of them, a mousy-looking girl about twenty, stands nose-to-nose with Carl; for nine floors we listen to her lecture one of the leading scholars on criminal law in America on how the justice system is a hive of racists who are used by a white hegemony to impose its control on a black underclass. Carl stands impassively, his eyes counting floors as we descend. When the door opens, the protesters bound out of the elevator like children on a field trip to the zoo.

By the time we hit the street there are at least seventy-five people milling around. The professor moves through the crowd, soaking up the love. There are more cameras waiting, and he starts giving interviews; this bit of theater reduces us to his wait staff, since without him, we don't know where we're going. Rayburn gives the expected no-comment—he looks good, not out of control—and we escape into his Crown Vic to wait. Eventually, Buchanan loads up his group. The professor gets in his rental car and pulls out on Second Avenue, followed by a line of a dozen or so cars. Rayburn pulls out after the last of Buchanan's crowd, and the police ID van follows us. Finally comes a row of five media vehicles, creating a motorcade of impressive length. We look like a funeral procession as we pull slowly out, Buchanan leading us back through downtown to I-40. We hit the four lights before the freeway, and the convoy is intact as it turns west, heading toward Memphis. Buchanan settles into a fifty-five-mile-per-hour cruise, running ten under the limit.

Now out of the camera's view, Rayburn grips the wheel like he wants to strangle it. He keeps looking in the rearview mirror at the vehicles stringing along behind us, cursing under his breath. After a few miles, the city begins its fade into semirural enclaves. The highway slices through heavily forested hills, the terrain on both sides of the highway scorched into a withering brown. The sky is hazy with humidity, muted into a nearly colorless gray.

After twelve miles, we turn south onto State Highway 70, a circuitous, two-lane road tightly bordered on one side by the Harpeth River. Buchanan slows for each switchback and S-corner, and the convoy bunches together behind his hypercareful driving. The metaphor of following Buchanan to a place of unknown destiny is not lost on Rayburn. “God, he's loving this,” he mutters. “He's like the Pied Piper of doom.”

“Montgomery Bell State Park is out this way,” I say. “You think he's heading there?”

“Three thousand acres of woodlands,” Carl offers, from the backseat. “That gun would be a needle in a haystack.” The road turns southeast now, and we click off twenty uneventful miles toward Montgomery Bell Park. We're nearly to the entrance when Buchanan slows to a crawl. The cars bunch up again, and Buchanan turns left onto a side road that's practically invisible in the trees. The road is ostensibly gravel, but nearly overgrown by grass. We move slowly, gradually climbing an incline through heavily forested acreage. We go this way about fifteen minutes, which in the difficult conditions feels like three times as long. We're several miles from Highway 70 now, seriously into
Deliverance
country. A meadow opens up before us, and Buchanan pulls off the road into the opening. The meadow is large, about twenty acres, and looks like it's been fallow for years. Tall brown grass blows in the hot air, and juniper and birch trees line the edges of the open space. In the distance, about seventy-five yards away, a dilapidated tobacco barn leans hard against the wind, its battered shape barely hanging together. It looks like a decent storm would send it splintering into pieces.

Buchanan steers his car through the rough pastureland toward the barn, and the convoy follows, the big vans hobby-horsing up and down over the uneven earth, the protesters' cars following behind. Rayburn's Crown Vic is squeaking and protesting with the off-road treatment, its suspension barely up to the task. Buchanan eventually pulls up on the east side of the dilapidated structure. The vehicles in the convoy scatter across a thirty-yard area. Doors slam as the crowd of people pile out of cars and vans. “Everything about this is wrong,” Carl mutters. “We're looking for a shotgun that killed three people in cold blood.”

Everyone gathers around Buchanan, who's plainly aware of the cameras. We wait for the ID crew to get out of their van with their shovels and a metal detector. When everybody's ready, the moment of truth arrives.

“The weapon is inside the barn,” Buchanan says. “Along the south wall.”

Rayburn steps through the crowd to Buchanan. “How did you know this was the one?”

Buchanan pulls a Polaroid photograph out of his pocket. “Kwame Jamal told me the directions. I confirmed the location with him with this picture.”

Rayburn plucks the photo from Buchanan's hand. “So you just went around looking for barns?”

“We've researched this whole area, and there are only three,” Buchanan answers. “All long abandoned. I took photographs of each of them. Kwame recognized this one right away.”

“Why inside a barn?” Rayburn asks. “Doesn't make sense. A structure draws people.”

“He could dig without being seen. He also said the ground is softer.”

People in the crowd start walking toward the building, and the ID squad moves quickly to cordon it off with yellow police tape. A couple of uniforms are posted, making sure bystanders don't interfere. The media photographers move toward the barrier to take their pictures. For a few seconds, Rayburn, Carl, and I are alone with Buchanan, out of media earshot. Rayburn leans over to the professor. “We're going to take this barn apart, stick by stick,” he says. “If it turns out that anybody's tampered with any evidence, I'm going to take you apart next.”